Monthly Archives: May 2013

Back in October 2011, Google announced that they will be shutting down the ill-fated Google Buzz social network. Now, the company is taking the final steps towards this goal but before they delete all your Buzz related data, they will be backing it up on Google Drive on or after July 17, 2013.

Buzz users will find a copy of all their Buzz posts in a new private folder in their Google Drive account. A second, publicly accessible folder will be made for all your public posts on Drive. As with other files on Drive, you can choose to download, share or delete these files. These newly-created files will not count against your storage limits.

Your files will only contain your posts and comments left on your posts by others. Your comments on others’ posts will appear in their backup. If you don’t wish to have a backup of your Buzz posts you should delete them before July 17 from your Google Dashboard.

Best Free iPad Games

Adult Swim has a reputation for amazing mobile games, and Super Monsters Ate My Condo is no exception. This is probably one of the most twisted renditions on the match-3 gameplay format: You must match colors of precariously stacked condos to clear them and gain powerups. The only problem? Angry monsters surround your stack and threaten to topple it, unless you feed them the matching color buildings, or clear three of that color.

Super Monsters Ate My Condo is actually a free sequel to Monsters Ate My Condo. It added a time limit for games and boosts that can be activated with in-game currency. This game is highly addictive, and will definitely suck hours of your time as you click for one more turn.

For those who like to punch down foes and relish the idea of a brawler coming to iPad, Punch Quest is unmissable. In this game, dubbed an “endless puncher” by its developers, you run through levels of enemies using two types of punches to bring them down.

The game features tongue-in-cheek humor and a great visual style. The different levels give Punch Quest a lot of variety despite its two-button design, and you’ll get a lot of mileage out of the game until you finally beat it.

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, by the legendary game designer, is a strategy title that puts you in the cockpit of fighter planes in World War I, where you’ll dogfight against other aircraft for victory.

Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol is another turn-based strategy game, a format that works great on touchscreens. On each turn, you’ll pick your maneuvers from arrows that climb, swoop and bank your aircraft. You’ll be able to attack other planes and dodge their guns.

There are several missions available free in the game, plus mission packs available for purchase if you’ve liked what you played.

If you love stretching your right brain with puzzles, Blendoku might be the game for you.

This game combines crosswords, Sudoku and color theory in an excellent brain-teaser game. On each level, you’re given several color swatches at the top of the screen, then a crossword-style grid at the bottom. You’ll need to put the colors in order based on various factors, including shade, hue and saturation. Puzzles eventually get much harder as you have to fill increasingly large grids.

The game is free with small banner ads at the top, but any purchase from the store — including additional daily hints — turns those off.

If you’ve always been interested in games that require resource and energy management, but don’t find farming appealing, Clash of Clans could pique your interest.

Clash of Clans is a blend of that formula, with elements of a strategy and tower defense game. You must collect elixir and gold to power your town of builders and fighters, but you need to raise an army and attack goblins or other players. You’ll be able to experiment with different troop types, spells and strategies as you level and gain resources. Of course, your camp is also under threat of attack, so you’ll need strategically placed defenses to keep other players out.

You can speed up the whole process by buying gems, of course, but generally the game allows a lot of wiggle room without ever having to purchase squat.

While DrawQuest isn’t a traditional game, its fun daily challenges ask you to stretch your creativity, and then rewards the best work.

Every day in DrawQuest, a half-started drawing asks you to flesh it out to complete the prompt. It could be anything from “What’s Under the Bed” to “Give this guy hair.” Once you’re done, you can see how other players responded to the prompt, rate your favorites and complete other challenges you may have missed.

It’s delightfully right-brained, and aims to encourage creativity in all its players.

Firaxis games has a reputation of strong strategy games, like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the Civilization franchise. The company’s first attempt at an iOS strategy is just as high-quality as its PC and console games, and it’s free.

Haunted Hollow is a turn-based strategy game in which you must construct a haunted house and send monsters to terrorize a nearby town. Your goal is to beat your opponent by taking over the town with your monsters. Haunted Hollow can be played against the computer, an opponent via network play, or with two players sharing the iPad.

Letterpress is a competitive game that won’t annoy you with in-app purchase reminders, while testing your lexicon.

To play, challenge an opponent to make as many words as possible from a 5×5 grid of random letters. Once you’ve used a letter, you’ve claimed it, so players have to pick from the remainder. Players can steal letters back, though, if they surround tiles with the opposing color.

Letterpress runs quickly, much faster than a Scrabble-clone. The game is free; though if you want to play with more than two people at the same time, the game requires only a buck to upgrade.

There’s some kind of appeal to sci-fi technobabble. It sounds silly, but shouting “setting phasers to stun!” makes everyone feel a little bit more awesome.

Spaceteam took that idea and turned it into a free party game playable on mobile phones and tablets. This multiplayer experience requires everyone in the same room to look at his or her screen and shout ridiculous sounding directions to each other. These directions correspond with the nonsensically named levers and dials displayed on other players screens, and it’s up to them to recognize and then flip them.

If everyone works together, your spaceship won’t fall apart, and you can survive to the next lightspeed jump. What sounds silly is probably one of the most fun party games available via mobile, and it’s absolutely free.

Racing games are hard to pull off with touch controls, so it’s nice to see an arcade racer like Top Bot on iPad. In Top Bot you customize a robot to race against your friends or random challengers.

The Top Bot races are asynchronous, so you’ll be able to compete any time a match is set up. The one-touch controls are easy to learn, and the race track is full of fun powerups and obstacles that make each race unique.

Most people expect a genre like collectible card games to stay analog, and yet the addictive nature of card collecting and the deep strategy to building your deck works perfectly on a tablet.

Zynga, better known for casual games, created War of the Fallen to give players who are new to the idea of deck building and card strategy a game that would teach them the basics, offer some real challenge and get them hopelessly addicted to the format. War of the Fallen is a fun game with great art and funny, creative character designs depicted on each card.

If you’ve always been interested in card games without the investment, this is a game worth trying, especially at the nice price of free.

Sometimes the most interesting games just make no sense. Take Whale Trail, a game where you, a whale, harness the power of rainbows to fly through the clouds to escape an evil monster. You know, just like real life.

Whale Trail is an endless runner style game, where you only control the whale’s altitude and descent by tapping the screen as it swoops among the clouds. Your goal is collect more rainbow fuel to keep it flying, and avoid the grumpy nimbus clouds that will sap your juice. While Whale Trail is simple in premise, the short rounds will keep you coming back for more as you level up your whale. Keep chasing that rainbow!

If you’re looking to duel it out in a traditional fantasy tactical game, Wizard Ops Tactics is for you. This game is part army building and part turn-based strategy, as you send out your army of wizards against opponents.

Wizard Ops Tactics has detailed environments in which to play, with terrain that can help or hurt players. A “fog of war” system shields your movements from your opponent until you meet face to face. Each wizard has spells rendered with dramatic effects that add a level of fun to the game, and the sounds effects, all created by the mouth of Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame, will make you want to wear headphones.

Wizard Ops Tactics provides you with one army, which you can upgrade as you play, or you can spring for more stuff in the store.

If trivia is the name of your game, you’ve probably already heard of You Don’t Know Jack. The trivia software relaunched last year with a free-to-play version on both mobile and Facebook, and it’s a total blast.

You can play one or more episodes of You Don’t Know Jack each day for free, and earn money to unlock new episodes. Each episode is recorded with different questions and original dialog, making for short bursts that only take about five minutes. The trivia references a lot of current events and popular culture, so you’ll see questions occasionally ripped from the headlines.

Since Temple Run, top-down endless runners have been in vogue, with many great variations. Subway Surfers is worth recommending because the brightly colored levels offer variety as you swipe to duck, jump, dodge, climb ramps and collect coins.

As you run to escape the ever-present train conductor, the level gets exceedingly more difficult and requires quicker reflexes. The coins you collect in-game can be used to purchase revives after you get knocked out — or you can purchase them for real money. You’ll end up addicted to Subway Surfer as you try to beat your score.

Chrome is one the best and most popular web browsers available, and the same goes for mobile devices. If you sign into your account, you can sync your open tabs, bookmarks and passwords between your devices.

Winner of “App of the Year 2012,” Paper increases your productivity by allowing you to jot down notes, sketches, illustrations, drawings and diagrams. You’re able to purchase additional tools within the app itself.

There are several photo apps available on the iPad, but Snapseed is one of the best (and it won Best Mobile Photo App of 2012 from the Technical Image Press Association). With Snapseed, you can easily adjust, edit and share your photos.

The eBay app lets you sell, browse, purchase and bid on items from your iPad. You’ll find advanced search capabilities, seamless scrolling and high-resolution photos. You can also customize your homescreen and share items with your friends via social media, email and text messaging. With this app, there’s no need to use eBay’s web version again.

Waze is a community-based traffic and navigation app with more than 40 million users. Drivers generate up-to-date information on traffic and road conditions, helping you get to your destination quicker and more efficiently.

The iPad doesn’t come with a native calculator app, making the free Calculator for iPad app a must-have. It combines functions for quick computations and a full scientific calculator, and you can even choose from several themes.

Flipboard’s tagline is “your personal magazine.” The app has been one of the most popular social news apps since its launch in 2010. With Flipboard on your iPad, you can keep up with everything that’s happening on the web, tailoring it to your own interests.

You don’t need an Amazon Kindle device in order to read Kindle ebooks. The Kindle iPad app gives you access to more than 1,000,000 ebooks, and the Whispersync technology keeps your page for you (and any notes, bookmarks, etc.) across devices.

Mint lets you easily manage your personal finances, bringing together information from all of your accounts in one place. You can see your transactions, manage budgets and view graphs of where your money goes (a feature exclusive for iPad).

Explore the planet in 3D with the Google Earth iPad app. You can travel to faraway places you’ve never seen before, preview destinations before you travel there in real life or even check in on the neighborhood where you grew up. The Earth Gallery includes real-time earthquakes, planes in flight, hiking trails and city tours, and the “tour guide” feature makes it easy to discover new places.

Pandora is a free personalized radio app with more than 200 million registered users. You can create custom radio stations based on your favorite artists, songs and genres. If you’re a super-user, you can subscribe to Pandora One for $3.99 per month.

Dropbox lets you save all of your files in one place and share them easily, as well as access them across all devices. You’ll get 2 GB of space free automatically, and you can add files to your “Favorites” for offline viewing and more.

Yesterday, we didn’t just get to see the unveiling of the Xbox One but also of the next game in the popular Call of Duty franchise: Call of Duty: Ghosts. Activision was present at the Microsoft event to provide a behind the scenes look at the new game as well as for the world premier of the Ghosts trailer.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a departure from the previous Call of Duty games and features completely new characters and story. You play as a member of Ghosts, a super elite team of highly trained soldiers formed from the remnants of the US military forces. The country is in turmoil and you’re the only hope it has to fight back.

Ghosts brings with it a brand new graphics engine for more realistic visuals. Along with fellow soldiers you will also be fighting alongside trained army dogs who can sniff out explosives and protect the team. There are also new gameplay elements such as ability to quickly vault over walls while running, do a running slide while shooting and sniffing out enemies from around a corner and shooting.

You can check out the new features in the behind the scenes video below and the trailer after that.

Back in March, Opera released a brand new version of the Opera browser for Android. Unlike the previous version that ran on the Presto engine, the new version was running on the more ubiquitous WebKit engine and also brought with it several new features and a new UI.

The browser is now finally out of beta stage and available for download on the Play Store. The new engine is fast and responsive and works well across websites better than the old engine. The new features include a new tab mode that shows thumbnails of your tabs on top of the page, new speed dial mode that allows you to rearrange your speed dials and even put them in folders, off-road mode that compresses data significantly before sending it to your device, automatic text wrap, improved download manager, customizable navigation bar that can be docked at the top or the bottom of the screen and a discover mode for finding curated content right in the browser without having to go look for it.

We have talked about the upcoming Batman: Arkham Origins game before. The third installment in the new Batman series of games, Arkham Origins takes place way before the events of the first two games and features a much younger Batman. The game is also made by Warner Bros. Games Montreal instead of Rocksteady Studios who made the first two games.

In this new game trailer, we see Batman getting up close and personal with one of the game’s antagonists, Deathstroke. Eventually, you also see the other two villains in the game, Deadshot and Black Mask. Black Mask is the main adversary in this game with the other two being hired assassins to take down Batman.You can check out the incredibly well made animated video below (visuals don’t seem in-game to me) which sets expectations rather high from this game.

Batman: Arkham Origins is expected to go on sale on October 25, 2013. You can pre-order it now to also play as Deathstroke in the game.

Flickr has gone through a major redesign that completely changes the look of the homepage and your photostream. Your homepage now has large photos from your friends as well as from other Flickr users that you can like and share without even having to open the image.

Your photostream also has received a major upgrade. You now have a large cover image up top and your photos span the entire width of the screen in a tiled pattern. Open an image and it takes up a major portion of the screen and the image information is placed below while giving more prominence to the image, the way it should be. There is also a beautiful new slideshow mode.

The new Flickr really comes to life with large, high resolution images. Which is why you will be glad to know that Flickr is now providing 1TB of free space to everyone so you don’t have to worry about running out of space and can upload your images in full resolution. The previous concept of regular and pro accounts doesn’t exist anymore. Everybody gets all the features but if you want to get rid of the ads you have to pay $49.99 per year. If you want to double your storage space to 2TB, then it is $499.99 per year.

Lastly, Flickr has also released a new app for Android. The app has also undergone a major redesign and now looks even better than the iOS app that was released last year. Unlike the iOS app, the Android app hides all the buttons in a neat drawer on the left side of the screen letting the photos take over the majority of your screen. You can choose to display photos from your contacts, groups or explore photos from other users. The app does a wonderful job of spreading images across the screen with minimal space in between.

Thanks to the new UI redesign and increased storage, Flickr has once again become a viable option for new users to upload their images. The beautiful new app also makes accessing and uploading photos on the move feel a lot better.